Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can’t be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?
The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can’t be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.
So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there’s the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.
So I don’t think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it’s better than Whatsapp.
These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.
The motivation to do the work, spend time learning the risks and available mitigations, disrupt existing social relationships in order to adopt better tools, inconvenience friends and family, partially isolate one’s self by avoiding the popular systems… all of these things are part of improving privacy in the real world, and at least for many people, fueled by a person’s feelings. Don’t discount the human factors just because you can’t quantify them.
Yeah, i did use words that express feelings in this topic I created and it was intentional because when people have to deal with something that involves uncertainty or something so advanced they don’t understand it entirely then they can become uncomfortable and scared even though maybe there isn’t something to be scared about or maybe the fear is justified.
My post was intended to be a discussion starter so we can dig into this, get to the truth and help everyone including myself to understand everything better.